The Evolution of the Mind

Chapter 11 The Evolution of the Mind From having recognized the new era of noogenesis in the history of evolution, we are obliged to distinguish a new ‘thinking layer’ spreading out on top of the plant and animal world. Over and beyond the biosphere there is the noosphere. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin e now come to humanity’s 5,000-year struggle to make sense of the world we live in, to understand what it truly means to be a human being and our place in the W overall scheme of things, particularly our relationship to God, the Universe, and each other. It has been a struggle because during all these millennia of noogenesis, evolution has not given us a sound conceptual foundation, framework, or context within which to con- duct our learning activities, preventing us from soundly grounding our learning on the Truth. Until the last two decades of the second millennium, we did not have a consistent, equalitar- ian way of forming concepts that would enable us to build a coherent body of knowledge that corresponds to all our experiences from the mundane to the mystical. It is only with the benefit of hindsight, standing at the Omega point of evolution, that we can fully see what has been happening to humanity during this tumultuous period in evolutionary history. None of our ancestors, inexorably being guided towards evolution’s glorious culmination, had a full understanding of what was going on in them and the world around them. Yet we base our own learning on what our less than fully conscious antecedents have been passing on for generation after generation. As Alfred North Whitehead famously said, “The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato”.1 In such a way, among many others, we hold on tenaciously to our traditions rather than adapting to our rapidly changing times. Of course, this conserv- atism puts humanity in a pretty perilous predicament, which we look at in Chapter 12, ‘The 783 784 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY Crisis of the Mind’ on page 989 and Chapter 13, ‘The Prospects for Humanity’ on page 1027. A central issue here is that while the mind has been evolving, it has become ever more dominant—in the form of the intellect—often stultifying and occluding our innate Intelli- gence. Academia is particularly prone to this disease, not the least because academic speciali- zation has led universities to contravene the root meaning of university, which is ‘turned into one whole’. But more generally, when the fragmented mind becomes separated from our Di- vine Source, it is inclined to anxiety and delusion, which causes much havoc in the world. As the result of the evolution of the analytical, egoic mind, the biological species Homo sapiens has evolved into a noetic one, which we can simply call Homo divisionis. However, not everyone during the past five thousand years followed this path. A tiny minority, who we can call mystics, gnostics, and jnanis, remained as Homo divinus, knowing what it truly means to be a divine human being. This generally happened through meditation, contemplation, or self-inquiry, leading to the quiescence, even the annihilation of the mind.2 But while these mystics continued to live in union with the Divine, which is our True Nature, to do so they generally became separated from the world at large. So neither of these traditional approaches truly leads to Wholeness. In one, the mind is the master, while in the other, the mind is ex- tinguished, eradicated.3 But there is a middle way, the way of Homo divinus universalis, in which the intellect becomes the servant of self-reflective Intelligence rather than the other way round. This is of the utmost importance, for while we are slaves to our egoic minds, human societies cannot possibly function in a harmonious, peaceful manner, a utopian vision that we look at in Chapter 14, ‘The Age of Light’ on page 1131. In the meantime, let us take a peek at how the mind has evolved since the dawn of history, when our ancestors first created written symbols for the languages they were speaking. As with every application of Integral Relational Logic, this chapter just highlights the major mile- stones of development, which we can use as pillars to go into as much detail as we wish. It is in this way that we can get a feeling of wholeness for the entire history of human evolution. For then the details, described in thousands and millions of books, become less significant. It is only when we see the Big Picture that the minutiae make sense. For then we can see the entire forest and not be distracted by the trees. There are several ways of creating a framework for this study. For instance, in studying the twenty-odd civilizations that have existed during the patriarchal epoch, Arnold Toynbee di- vided these into three parts, primary, secondary, and tertiary, covering Europe, Asia, and the Americas.4 We show maps of the approximate locations of these civilizations, including the Americas, even though these have had comparatively little influence on the world as it exists today. These are the primary Mayan and Andean civilizations and the secondary Mexic and CHAPTER 11: THE EVOLUTION OF THE MIND 785 Yucatec ones, with prophecies based on the Mayan calendar much exciting the New Age movement. It is interesting to note that civilizations in the noosphere have some similarities to species in the biosphere. Both emerge by a minority of individuals evolving in a new direction from their parents, when phylogeny of both species and civilizations recapitulates ontogeny, rather than the other way round. For when we are born into a particular civilization, people normal- ly adapt the customs and beliefs of their natal culture. It is in this conservative way that civilizations maintain themselves, a situation that has become critical at these times of unprecedented rates of evolutionary change. We could therefore call Homo divisionis Homo civitas, a Latin word meaning ‘citizenship, union of citizens, state’. Then the members of each species would be Homo civitas x, where x could be Latin Aegyptus for members of the long-lasting Egyptian civilization, from the Greek Aíguptos. But this could get pretty heavy and not add much in understanding to where we are today. For we are all interdependent on each other, as the banking crisis in 2007 and 2008 showed quite clearly. So in practice, we are all members of Homo civitas mundanus or simply Homo mundanus, for mundanus in Latin means ‘a citizen of the world’.5 From the perspective of how the patriarchal epoch emerged in Europe, the Middle East, and India, the study of Indo-European languages, spoken by about half the world’s popula- tion, indicate that several civilizations had a common ancestor, which we explore a little. From here we can then focus attention on Western civilization, which dominates the world today through the rapidly disintegrating global economy. In A History of Western Philosophy, Bertrand Russell divides his study into three books, called ‘Ancient Philosophy’, ‘Catholic Philosophy’, and ‘Modern Philosophy’. This is how Russell describes his approach to writing this book: When I wish to write a book on a subject, I must first soak myself in detail, until all the separate parts of the subject-matter are familiar; then some day, if I am fortunate, I perceive the whole, with all its parts duly interrelated. After that, I only have to write down what I have seen. The nearest analogy is first walking over a mountain in a mist, until every path and ridge and valley is separately familiar, and then, from a distance, seeing the mountain whole and clear in bright sunshine.6 This has some similarities to the approach that I have been taking in writing Wholeness. But, for me, when the Totality of Existence is vividly seen as a coherent whole in the blazing light of Consciousness, there is less need to follow all the paths in the mountains. They all dissolve into seamless, borderless Wholeness, quite exquisitely beautiful. From this solid foundation, we can then see the details in their true perspective, as the manifestation of the wondrous variety of forms of life, as beautiful art forms, and as a multitude of forms and structures that we need to deal with the practicalities of daily life, both as individuals and as a species. 786 PART III: OUR EVOLUTIONARY STORY In a similar manner to Russell, Parts I, III, and V in Richard Tarnas’ The Passion of the Western Mind are called ‘The Greek World View’, ‘The Christian World View’, and ‘The Modern World View’. Parts II, IV, and VI are then concerned with the transformation of these world-views, the last leading to the postmodern mind, which dominates intellectual thinking today. Here is Richard’s own approach to the massive task he set himself: A book that explores the evolution of the Western mind places special demands on both reader and writer, for it asks us to enter into frames of reference that are sometimes radically different from our own. Such a book invites a certain intellectual flexibility—a sympathetic metaphysical imagination, a capacity for viewing the world through the eyes of men and women from other times. One must in a sense wipe the slate clean, attempt to see things without the benefit or burden of a preconceived outlook.7 From the perspective of Wholeness, which begins afresh at the very beginning, without any preconceptions, as Chapter 1 on page 35 describes, the True Nature of all of us is Wholeness.

Load more